25 Jul Conversation I — On the Fold
Interviewer: In many design teams, research is treated as a tool for optimization. Tasks are timed, flows are measured, and success is defined by efficiency.
But some of the artists you reference — Pollock, Burri, Fontana — worked with disruption. They cut, tore, burned, distorted.
Do you think UX research needs this kind of disruption? And if so — where does it show up?
Zulberti: For me, it shows up in time.
Not in what users do, but in how long they do it. Where they linger. Where they hesitate. Where their rhythm breaks from what the system expects.
This doesn’t usually happen in the interface. It happens in the research process itself — in the moment the method stops working cleanly.
You plan for a logical flow, but then someone finishes faster than expected, or loses time in a place you thought was easy.
That’s not a bug. That’s a fold.
A fold in the timeline. A fold in the framework.
It’s the moment where human behavior doesn’t align with the structure you designed — and that misalignment is where insight lives.
Interviewer: So the fold isn’t a problem to be solved — it’s a signal that the system is touching something real.
Can a fold be designed? Or does it always arrive uninvited?
Zulberti: A fold can’t be designed directly. That would be like trying to plan a surprise for yourself.
But you can design the conditions in which a fold is more likely to appear:
– Asking questions that aren’t fully closed
– Leaving space between prompts
– Observing without needing to interpret immediately
– Accepting that some of the most valuable things might not fit the report
The fold often arrives when you stop trying to collect answers — and start letting the user shape the timeline. That’s when you see where the structure bends.
Interviewer: What’s the role of the researcher in that moment? Witness? Interpreter?
Zulberti: Sometimes we don’t do anything. We let it happen.
No clarifying questions. No “could you explain that more?”
The user pauses, or rushes, or loops back. That’s the fold.
And if we try to iron it out, we lose it.
There’s something realer than explanation in those moments.
Our job isn’t to make it clearer — it’s to let it stay strange.
Interviewer: What do you do with the fold after it appears? Do you document it? Do you share it? Or do some folds just stay with you?
Zulberti: I document the fold. But not like a finding — more like a trace.
I write it as it was.
Not cleaned up. Not rephrased. No insight, no label.
Because if I don’t write it down, it disappears.
But if I try to explain it too soon, I lose what made it matter.
So I hold it. I return to it.
And I let it work on me — before it works on the design.
Interviewer: You’ve shown how the fold reveals itself through interruption — a misalignment in time, a break in the structure.
Have you experienced a moment in your own life where that kind of disruption became more meaningful than the plan itself?
Zulberti: As my personal reflection, I think about traveling in a country where I didn’t speak the language. I prepared phrases, rehearsed what I might need to say — planning for every situation.
But the most human parts of the trip happened when none of that worked. When I had to gesture, wait, improvise.
That unpredictability became the real connection. The fold between intention and interaction.
Position in the Series
This article opens the series by introducing research as a material — shaped not by plans, but by interruptions.
The idea of the fold becomes a recurring figure throughout the series — reappearing as pause, as silence, as trace.